Dates and times are incredibly complex. They can be different in different countries, languages. They are often inconsistent and have weird edge-cases. These are some basic rules I apply when working with dates and times.

Having just brought a Google Home, I’ve quickly realised that, although Google are supposedly fairly open about allowing people to develop for it, there are still far too many limitations. To try and get round these, I’ve been looking at automation tools. In this article, I will list some of the key tools and their strengths and weaknesses.

After the recent high-profile vulnerabilities, I decided to turn on the free version of CloudFlare for this domain.
CloudFlare provides a reverse proxy service that sits in front of your domain. It will serve content where it can on your behalf (caching), optimise content where it can (e.g. minimising JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc.). But even more important from my perspective is their ability to protect against a number of vulnerabilities.

Microsoft Windows administrators now have a number of ways for managing their estates.
Group Policy (GPO)
Allows very fine-grained control over every aspect of Windows. Primarily aimed at Windows desktops. Requires Active Directory (AD) and very careful configuration. Requires well trained specialist staff to get it right.
System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)
Allows central control over software delivery. Also requires AD. Configuration of delivery packages can be complex and very careful change control is required.

iTunes on Windows has always been a horrible application. It is highly intrusive, installing many background services. It also has a terrible UX/design. So, now that it is available in the Windows Store, is there a difference? Improvement?

Outlook has a custom URL protocol that allows interaction with different elements such as folders, mail and calendar items and contacts, Since Outlook 2007, this has been restricted for use only within Outlook itself but there are some tremendous opportunities for use from simple web systems. This post explains how to turn it on, even for Outlook 2013 (Office 365 version). It also gives pointers to other articles on how to use the protocol.

Update 2018-04-22: Reformatted after move from WordPress to Hugo.
Wow! I’ve just discovered by accident that Windows 7 beta supports a few IPTC XMP attributes in picture files. At last, Microsoft supporting standards!
Above is a screen shot from the properties of a test picture.
The Description and Origin sections seem to be standard IPTC fields and I checked them out using iTag.
In iTag the Title attribute comes out as both the Title and the Description.

One of the features available under UNIX is the Message of the Day (MOTD). This is run every time you start a command prompt and displays the content of a file. In addition, the UNIX shells allow all sorts of stuff to be run and configured every time you start a new prompt using the .profile and .bashrc command files.
Windows users don’t generally expect that kind of flexibility from their command prompts.